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Fifty(ish) reading ideas

24/10/2014

1 Comment

 
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In looking through some papers recently, I came across a three page handout from some course in the past, which I thought might be worth sharing. I can’t attribute it, as there is no identifier. I hope the original author won’t mind me sharing the ideas with a broader audience.

Activate prior knowledge

  • Word association chain around the key word in the title or the heading or the image, perhaps with a time limit to provide extra challenge.
  • Spot the genre or text type from the title, cover, image used.
  • KWL; What do I already know about this? What do I want to know? Then after reading, what have I learned?
Prediction

  • How might the story continue? Sequence possible key events, words, phrases. What clues have led to this proposal?
  • Multiple choice endings. Give alternative scenarios, discuss and choose.
  • Use the text for cloze activities. What words could go into spaces? Discuss and choose.
Visualising

  • Learners given drawing tools and have to draw what they visualise while a story is being read to them. Share the images and reasoning how the images came to mind. Author intention?
  • Design a storyboard for a passage, key event or as a prediction.
  • Pictures of events, characters, with key associated descriptive language.
  • Freeze frame tableaux of key events- photograph.

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Summarising

  • Devise a subheading for each paragraph, to show the key message.
  • Highlight words in a passage for a specific purpose; eg adjectives/adverbs used.
  • Reduce the text to five sentences, then five words, then one word.
  • Sequence a list of points from most to least important.
  • Restructure the passage into a different form, spider diagram, bullet points, flow diagram, decision tree, labelled picture, time line.
  • Just a minute; learners have to talk on the subject for 1 minute. Rules as needed; repetition/hesitation/deviation… depends on age and ability.
  • Write five top tips/golden rules for…
  • True/false statements, based on a text. Select and justify decisions.
Questioning

  • Copy the text into the middle of an A3 sheet. Use the blank space to ask questions about the meaning, questions to the author etc
  • Hot seat the “author or a character”; probably the teacher or TA, if brave enough.
  • Give the answers, what are the questions?
Structural analysis

  • Text sequencing; reconstruct a text cut into chunks.
  • Narrative map/flow diagram of events, or ideas in the text. Order and organise.
  • Try to show changing levels of humour, tension, drama as a sort of “graph”/diagram.
  • Log the structure onto a grid; eg cause/effect, argument/counter-argument.
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Character analysis

  • Tension/emotion “graph”; horizontal axis =time/narrative events, vertical axis = tension/emotion.
  • Character on trial- summing up speech for/against or like/dislike a character.
  • Magazine profile of a character.
  • Dilemma; stop the story. List alternative courses of action, based on understanding to date. Review after reading next passage.
  • Draw character; label with key descriptive words/phrases.
  • Thought bubbles for specific characters at specific points in the story.
  • Retell a scene from the point of view of an alternative observer.
  • Character rank; most important to least important, powerful/least powerful, kindest/meanest.
  • Relationship mapping in some diagrammatic form; arrow graphs, logic grid- characters along top and side of grid, then discuss relationships in interlocking boxes.
  • Roles in a story. For specific characters, describe their relationships with others, friend, son, villain and how they affected the story.
Thematic analysis

  • Interview the author for a TV/radio show; link to film and audio recording.
  • Illustrate the main themes, with associated quotations.
  • I’m going on a “quote hunt”.
  • Select key quotes and how they impacted on the storyline.
  • Top theme; discuss the most important theme and the reasoning for selection.
  • Write a book blurb.
  • Write a postcard/letter to the author. If they are still alive, send. If not the teacher becomes the author and responds in kind.
  • Explore a moral or key message from the text.
Texts and personal experience.

  • Learner personal vocabulary notebooks. Keeping words, phrases from texts.
  • Word club; run like a book club, sharing and discussing new words.
  • Highlighters; Key language features; adjectives in a persuasive leaflet, emotive language in a charity appeal, imperatives in a recipe.
  • Rewrite a text into a different format; eg persuasive to informative.
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1 Comment
Mark Prowse
8/10/2016 05:06:16 pm

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    Chris Chivers

    Long career in education, classroom and leadership; always a learner.
    University tutor and education consultant; Teaching and Learning, Inclusion and parent partnership.
    Francophile, gardener, sometime bodhran player.

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